Indeed! Over toast this morning, I get to see the setup for the next five years of story lines. And at this rate, we’re rapidly approaching the storytelling and art levels of Girl Genius and Schlock Mercenary.

Girl Genius has been VOLUNTARILY removed from future nominations by Authorial Fiat… The Foglios have won it the last 3 years straight, and they said they feel that they NEED to give someone else a chance or the award will become meaningless. So please DO remember Wapsi Square when nominations start for the next years award.

okay
had to take a moment there so I did not emit a high pitched squee over this comic.
just the thought of more peeps from the old stories 😀
(coughs)
anyway. Glad that is why Brandi was upset. understandable really 🙂 she prolly thought she had kept them all nice and safe and someone found one!

probably not entirely by themselves, but if that is the case then the Grid that Bud talks about has been messed up since WWII due to the German U-Boat taking it away from it’s resting place in Ireland. then again… Is it a V-Cell in the first place? it was never explicitly stated if it was or not. from what Bud is saying here, it is highly likely that it IS, but until we know if the thing Shelly brought back from the Time-Forest IS or ISN’T a V-Cell, we’re just guessing; also remember that May has ANOTHER device she calls a Galaxy Alternator, is THAT a V-Cell or not?

right, but what WAS buried in Ireland in THIS loop? (the thing that the Nazi’s found) i think it was fully functional in THIS time loop, because Shelly #1 was the one that put the plutonium into it, and that was at least back in midevil times for the Celtic graveyard etc, not counting the 56 loops in between (or at least the last 1450-ish years)… anyways.. there has been PLENTY of time for Brandi to have found it, and either left it where it was safe, or to have moved it into position for the World Grid, if that’s the case, then when the Nazi’s took it then got sunk, it messed up the grid and we just now found out about the error, so Brandi may NEED to take it OUT of Jin, in order to fix the Grid.

You should also consider these people think in terms of millennial projects – not even the earth is stable over such a span, so I suspect any competent engineer designing for such built in as much redundancy as s/he could afford.

I don’t think the cross artifact had anything to do with the grid. Brandi would have lost it back then when she saw it, if it was part of that system. I’m not sure that thing even contained a V-Cell.

Also don’t think the V-cell used in Jin was a part of the grid power source since it was put together separately. Seems to me to be one crafted apart from the initial stock. Therefore no weakening of the grid.

it wouldn’t make a difference what CM Loop it came from, because of the TIME RESET… that means that the ONLY time we in loop 57 are aware of is THIS loop, and that EVERYTHING got rebooted to the PRECISE LOCATION AND STATUS they were in when May attempted to destroy the CM and cause the loops in the first place. SO, if Brandi had found and emplaced a V-cell in the grave in Ireland, BEFORE Tepoz hid the GG’s, and got subsequently stoned, then for the last 400 years at least we’ve been safe from ET’s, or were until the Nazi’s took it away. and remember, the CM loops didn’t START happening until WELL AFTER the GG’s were separated from the Chimera, but BEFORE the various fallings-out and battles of the Mahabharata, and Ramayana. because THEY were NOT used as a weapon DURING those accounts, they were part of the clean-up crew (ironic isn’t it 🙂 ) that went and found the remaining V-cells and hid them, so they couldn’t have been the combined Chimera in order to do that. and I’ll make a W.A.G for some more Moxana points that those accounts are the correct time frame for the various Time-Keepers to have died out.

I didn’t say dropped permanently. Just dropped suddenly and moved on to something else, time and again. Of course he will pick them up in the future or he would not have done them at all. Just that it’s annoying to have them stopped so suddenly like that. No idea of when they might be picked up again, if ever, on some. So much up in the air. Not unlike a soap opera.

Probably. There’s still ‘Crispy’ to worry about, we need to see how Shelly and Justin’s relationship resolves, and Brandi, last time we saw her, seemed to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown / angst storm. As well as long standing questions like what ‘the gods’ are up to and who stoned Tepoz. But those might be part of, or become part of, the next quest…

Tunguska was relatively small beans, as asteroid-fragment explosions go, and not all that uncommon. I has somewhat surprised to learn, a while back, that there’s one Hiroshima-bomb-level explosion in the upper atmosphere, caused by a small chunk of rock, about once per year on average. Tunguska was roughly a thousand-year event if I recall correctly… no more than a 10,000-year event at best.

The V-cells sound as if they could be much worse.

If some of the Olde Gods show up and start making nasty, a little city-destroying asteroid impact might start sounding like a really good idea… brrr…

As far as Tunguska, I recently heard a theory that it may bave been caused by a test of Nicola Tesla’s tower in NJ. He was testing it at the same time that the blast happened. And Paul has mentioned the tower before.

Yup. Would not have required much difference in its course to have come down a bit later (or westward) and southward, and taken out Moscow. A bit more variation, and Paris or London could have gone bye-bye.

… and a bunch of flashy plasma golf balls might have served as an effective “searchlights shining into the sky from the used-car dealer’s lot” attention-getter. Perhaps not the best was of working off a snit that Bud and Brandi could have chosen.

Whee. Yes, this really does set up the next little while to be Verry Interesting.

It puts the Golem Girls in a difficult situation. They (Bud anf Brandi) might be able to become mortal and human-ish as Jin has, but doing so might require the finding and use of more V cells… and might weaken or break the world’s coating of Gods-B-Gone and leave us open to invasion.

It’s even possible that Jin’s transformation might already have done so… although since the V cell which powered her alternator-artifact had been outside our timeline, that might not be the case.

Yuck… as if Jin or the others need another reason to feel guilty…

The world might end up needing all that “super team” firepower somebody was talking about in yesterday’s comments, if a bunch of extremely mojo-heavy “visitors” from the next dimension over decide that they want to come back to their old vacation haunts and start running things again.

But, according to the mythic trope, erecting a barrier to invasion of heebie-jeebies is never a permanent solution. Sooner or later, the barrier weakens and collapses–and all those aliens are still waiting to be dealt with.

Hopefully, the girls and their Scooby Gang will be ready when the walls come down.

[Reminds me of a science fiction story where the reason there were no time travelers in the present day was because a future government had erected a barrier. When the barrier was disabled, a whole slew of visitors appeared, caused much chaos and confusion–until a well-chosen death caused all the future travelers to vanish. One of the last travelers (from the past, which is our present) deduced that there was another barrier that would be erected–and raised a toast to the moment after that barrier fell.]

Brandi hung out an interdimensional do not disturb sign.
Since we haven’t seen anyone porting in just yet we can hazard a guess that our Jin Tylenol Mental cold cure was a new V-cell that was recently fabricated. Prior to the Shelly’s forest trip, it wasn’t actually powered up or a part of that grid that Brandi set up.

It always bugged me that writers tend to write about Nordic, Greek, and Roman gods like they have been in stasis and doing nothing for the last 2,000 years. This, on the other hand, is clearly a pantheon that has been busy.

Any chance that you (or some other well-read scholar) could identify some of the relevant sections of these two epics? I’d love to read through these bits but don’t really have the time to digest both epics in their entirety.

Sheesh. LOL Just the wikipedia article alone is an epic read!Mahabharata

While reading the Wikipedia article I had a realization. We are lucky in the US that we only have 200 years of history to learn in school. Most of the world has thousands of years of history in their countries. Plus all of the mythology.

I recommend that anyone interested in Indian Mythology tae a gander at Nina Paley’s feature-length animation, Sita Sings the Blues; not only is it an interesting, funny and tragic story and film, but you will meet a great early blues singer’s recordings.

(You can watch it free online, download a DVD image free to burn your own copy, or buy a pre-recorded DVD.)

yep!, the various texts that describe a device that made the manna they ate could, in theory, be an actual high-tech nuclear powered artificial food factory. i saw an article that described how somebody is working on it now and that it IS scientifically feasible with today’s tech level (almost). That, and withm the descriptions of the Arc of the Covenant being a crude nuclear reactor that the “clerical vestments” that had to be worn or you’d die in it’s presense were the anti-rad suits. yep sure sounds like it to me.

Then there’s the theory that the Chinese “demons” that can’t turn corners are actually nuclear radiation–and that the Chinese are really descendants of star-drive workers who jumped ship several hundred thousand or million years back, and still remember a bit of their anti-radiation lore. . . .

Chlorella i.e. algae made into edible stuff.
The theory goes that there was a Mana-Machine that was actually a nuclear-driven , very compact factory for edible algae.
The reactor that drove it, was stored in the Arc of the Covenant. (hence the gold&lead) and priests, probably, wore lead-lined ceremonial clothing.
Those that had a peek at the Ark without he clothing had symptoms remarkably similar to radiation-poisoning.

Especially the Sodom-Gomorrah thing. Reads much like the bomb drop on Heroshima and it’s aftermath. Also a reason not to look back so as to not be blinded by the flash. There is speculation the pillar of salt thing actually meant one would be blinded as if salt was thrown iin the eyes.

yep, modern scientists have found vitrified rock out there in the Middle East deserts that exactly matches rock samples from various nuke test sites, and that particular type of rock is NOT able to be produced naturally, thus implying it was indeed a weapon blast out there (where exactly i dis-remember right now)

as for the pillar of salt thing, I’m not so sure how accurate it is, but every image I’ve ever seen depicting Lot’s wife getting turned into a pillar of salt shows Sodom/Gomorrah in a slight valley, with Lot and other surviving family members on the opposite side, downhill from the crest, with Lot’s wife standing right at the top of said hill… to me that could be the towns getting nuked, and the heat wave totally evaporating/irradiating away all of the moisture from her and all that’s left is the solid components, ie. a dry dusty SALTY compound. Lot was protected because he was down below the crest of the hill and the heat/radiation was blocked by the earthen hill itself… yeah, OK the whole body’s worth of water getting vaporized that quickly would tend to explode a person via steam pressure, but still… if you were to touch the leftovers and then taste it, it WOULD taste salty…
another thing i always mistrusted about that story… if GOD is Omnipotent and Omniscient and All-Powerful, etc, etc… why did he send the angels down to get them out of town in a HURRY? he could have just waited till they got out of town and to a safe distance THEN Poof!… nope… it sounds to me like “god” was on a TIMETABLE, one that gave him minimal to no extra time for slowpokes… IE like an orbit-to-surface launch window for a nuclear missile! if you delay the launch too much, there isn’t enough fuel on-board the missile to compensate for the difference in trajectories and the missile doesn’t hit what you’re aiming at. therefore he sent his minions down to rush them out of town just ahead of the launch, and they STILL just barely make it to safety.

That’s a good analogy. Monica acted as a portal to another dimension, through which a Big Bad wanted to escape. The escape was prevented.

And, the destruction of the Calendar Machine (by means of the same Monica-portal) meant that time would stop looping over and over. Instead, it could flow forward naturally, as it should, into an era which had not ever occurred before.

this is one time that I worry about the potential slippery slope. all because a few people in Hollywood want to control a small amount of material, the U.S. government and other agencies will be in a position to maintain control of everything that you see online.

I think that the only reaction to the passing of this bill is to have a all-encompassing ban on all U.S. film releases and DVDs.

Hpw nice. The do-gooders are at it again. We’ve already lost some of our freedom of speech due to political correctness and specious lawsuits, now this. There is always a faction which hates free expression. If something like this happens, I would hope the geek network would simply drop the WWW and create something else to take it’s place. Something better and inherently free of government or hollywood meddling would be good. Perhaps if the current WWW dries up due to over government regulation, a lesson “might” be learned.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s kind of weird that Monica introduces Bud to Euryale and there’s no “hello, how are you” or anything, Bud just immediately launches from sitting at a park bench to discussion of world-altering metaphysics and ancient technology?

It isn’t just that. Bud isn’t surprised to see her in Euryale’s company. There is no sheepish “sorry we omitted some details, sweetie” from Bud to Monica. That sort of thing. The characters stopped being characters here and started being story vehicles.

nah
she is just excited and wants to get the info out. Bud is almost glowing 🙂

you never suddenly started a conversation with someone who has just come into the room at work or somewhere without first greeting them? i know i have ^^ when info is to be shared the common curtesy get ignored.

That and I assume Monica texted bud to let her know to meet them and would have mentioned eury 🙂